funny

What happens when one of Google’s street view camera vehicles encounters a low bridge or a muddy Australian road?

Tankmen is funny, no doubt, but I wonder what it means when we’re deeply embroiled in two of the longest running armed conflicts of US history that we find it so easy to make comedy about war.

The TechnoViking will have you scratching your head for the first 90 seconds, then ROFLing for a while. Not enough yet? Watch him dance to “It’s a Piece Of Cake To Bake A Pretty Cake.” This one claims to be the original, and though the sound is bad the video quality is much better than the others.

Thing is, now that you’ve watched it a couple times, did he stop a pickpocket or admonish a groper at the beginning?

You’ll find more than a few of Demetri Martin‘s (his site) videos on the web (one, two, quotes). Though I think he’s particularly good at powerpoint comedy and this flipchart thing, you’d think he doesn’t like to do interviews.

Found in the MySQL 5.0 Reference Manual:

• Related(g1,g2,pattern_matrix)

  Returns 1 or 0 to indicate whether the spatial relationship specified by pattern_matrix exists between g1 and g2. Returns –1 if the arguments are NULL. The pattern matrix is a string. Its specification will be noted here if this function is implemented.

(emphasis mine.)

Richard Stallman‘s Soulja Boy dance, MIT style (via).

Like Mr. Ranganathong said: “The intellect cannot be tied down with a decimal thong.” (via)

How to pick up girls in the library. Indeed, it’s Picking Up Girls Made Easy.

From Kim to Zach to me to you: Bush Vs. Zombies.

Now we know: the guy doesn’t understand the difference between fact and fiction. Most people thought Shaun of the Dead was horror/comedy, not documentary. Poor W probably read The Zombie Survival Guide as an instruction manual (don’t show him How To Survive a Robot Uprising, please).

Gah. The guy hired a cannibal, fears animal-human hybrids, and flip-flops on evolution.

There is little doubt that the great diversity of styles and techniques of bowlers from countries enjoying test match status has helped to shape the history of [the sport]. With the recent world-wide implementation of professional coaching schemes, which generally teach only one, or perhaps two optimal ways…, bowling could be in danger of losing its technical diversity. Are we therefore on the verge of a new era in which the art of bowling is irretrievably lost? Possibly! However, as discussed below, the biomechanical principles underlying the bowling technique reveal some interesting new facts.

Unfortunately (for my purposes), that quote is about the wrong kind of bowling.

Anybody who’s seen me bowl knows how bad I am, even if I am among the few people I know who’s been to the bowling museum and hall of fame. Seeing these videos makes me tremendously thankful that nobody’s had a camera around when I’ve been throwing gutter balls down the lanes.

My nephew checked his email while he was here this morning and this was the first thing in his inbox. Maybe it’s because he’s 17 and my humor is at about the same level, but both of us were cracking up over it.

Miserable attempt at recovering my dignity with serious criticism: Will Farrell and landlord prove there is no meaning (or humor) without context. Would it be as funny without Will Farrell (with full afro!)? Or if the landlord wasn’t an innocent looking young girl?

Among the pop-culture viral videos I apparently missed is Matt Harding‘s dancing. I had to turn to Wikipedia for an explanation:

Harding was known for a particular dance, and while videotaping each other in Vietnam, his traveling companion suggested he add the dance. The videos were uploaded to his website for friends and family to enjoy. Later, Harding edited together 15 dance scenes, all with him center frame, with the background music “Sweet Lullaby.”

The video was passed around by e-mail and eventually became “viral”, with his server getting 20,000 or more hits a day as it was discovered, generally country by country due to language barriers, before the launch of major video upload sites.